My first impression of the Chrome Web Store
I've been interested for a long time to find out how the chrome web store stacks up against Play (aka Android market) for app developers. So, largely by way of an experiment, I published my harmonica tuning tool on there today and I thought I'd capture some rambling observations in a blog post.
CWSDD = Chrome Web Store Developer Dashboard
PADC = Play Android Developer Console
(an aside: I'm sure it's being worked on, but Google really needs to start unwinding some of the complexity that's creeping into the naming of their developer services)
I wanted to start off with a small comment about packaging your web app for inclusion on the chrome web store: it's incredibly simple. JSON+PNG->ZIP and that's it. I've written a couple of chrome extensions for internal team use - that was super simple. This is even simpler.
The CWSDD uses the Google Webmaster site ownership verification tool to safeguard against people publishing other developer's applications under their own apps. The only minor thing I tripped-up over was that using *:// requires verification of both http:// and https://.
This is a very specific tool that I doubt will garner even a small handful of users, so I'll be honest: I dashed off an icon and the minimum number of promotional images I could get away with. Even then I struggled with the icon. The guidelines specify no perspective. Is there any way to draw a harmonica without perspective that doesn't make it look like an abstract composition of shapes? Well, I politely sidestepped that guidance. It also felt odd producing just a single icon asset; I've become accustomed to creating multiple assets for Android app icons and have come to see it as as a feature.
The documentation for the CWSDD does an excellent job of communicating which assets you need to provide and why, and how you can expect they'll be used. I don't recall anything as clear as that for the PADC, but things may have improved considerably since I last read the docs. Of course the CWS has the advantage of not being required to support legacy clients over a wide number of form-factors, as the Android Play developers must.
There were no onerous requirements. I got away with supplying just two images, a small promotional image and a screenshot (this little app isn't worth more).
There's the usual angst as you try to pigeonhole your latest wunderapp into a category. The CWSDD has a significant edge over the PADC store here since it provides for a primary and a secondary category together with developer supplied tertiary categories. How these developer specified categories are actually used is unclear though. All the guidance says is "We will use them to improve our selection of categories."
Personally I like the Google Code approach: free text labels but with the support of a large number of "common labels" (possibly clustered from the aggregate of those already supplied, I don't know). I do think that would provide a good basis for categorizing apps and surfacing relevant ones to users.
In general, the process of uploading and publishing was very similar to that of publishing an Android app; both in terms of how the forms are presented and the flow that ties them together. On the whole I'd say that the CWSDD feels more 'coherent', but that the PADC clearly packs in more features.
Around publishing, the CWSDD shows up a couple of very basic deficiencies in the PADC. The first is that the CWSDD supports "trusted testers". It appears to allow you to define your testers by membership of any Google Group you set up. I didn't use it (this is a bit embarrassing, but I don't actually know anyone else who'd want to use this app) so I don't know how well it works in practice, but it looks like a very clever solution.
Secondly, CWSDD allows you to supply a Google Analytics ID to track user views of app listing (Google Code supports this too). It's a real pity that PADC doesn't do something similar; this is valuable information that Android developers are missing out on.
These are just my first impressions of the chrome web store developer dashboard, with an application that I think has a place in the store, but which is nevertheless very a modest app. I found it simple, well documented, and quite slick.
I will definitely design any future web apps with an eye to integrating them into the chrome web store and will also suggest it to relevant clients as a strong option (with the caveat that I don't know how smoothly non-free apps operate).
